The story behind Platformines (developed by Magiko Soft and coming out on 28th March) is one full of surprises and intrigue! Thanks to this second “Dev. Diary”, players will get the chance to see how a developer comes up with new ideas.

After the success of Platformance, Cedric and Ludovic decided to use their engine to build their next big game, Platformines. Following fan feedback, the two friends decided to add weapons in order to make the upcoming game even more exciting!

Platformines has integrated the comical “flying eyes”, bouncing on the world blocks. According to the dev team, this feature allows players to use 2 skills: “Players needed to avoid obstacles coming from everywhere, and they also needed to focus on killing them”. This first draft of the monsters/enemies is still within the game, numerous versions after the initial alpha!

When remembering the creation of the weapons, Ludovic says: “To shoot those “beholders monsters”, we had equipped our hero with a shooting fire weapon. At first, it was a “simple” 6 shots weapon with loading, reloading range and bullet speed properties. We could already play with these parameters to start introducing random weapons attributes in the loots of the game.”

The enemies’ creation process went through another step when Magiko Gaming thought about producing a human enemy having the same properties as the hero: move on the ground, change direction, jump several times and use multiple weapons! When creating new enemies, Cedric states: “It was one of the toughest challenges, as we needed to allow these new enemies to move realistically in our random environment. We developed a way to process path they could go through. The first prototype was reassuring: Path generation and loading were not too long and human enemies could now move!”

This encouraging success led the developers towards the next step: creation of the weapons! At first, Cedric and Ludovic thought about:

Classical shotguns (short range, 6 bullets)

SMG (25 bullets)

Grenades that can destroy the landscape (“It had to be cancelled due to several constraints related to the platforming requirements”)

Following the grenades’ cancelling, “Another idea came to us: shooting slow but very efficient bullets: a bazooka! It launches bullets that produce a blast when they hit something. To balance the blast (which can hit several enemies at once), we made these blasts dangerous for ourselves => your own blast also hurts you if you are hit!”

The next point that Platformines developers worked hard on is the customisation: “We decided to offer a full character customisation: Head, nose, mouth, shirt, and trousers can then be chosen among dozens of choices! We can obtain thousands of different characters thanks to this.”

Cedric recalls that customisation was offered only for Male characters at first (even if they had also a Female model in-game). After the first beta provided, lot of players asked to have the customization possibilities for Female characters as well: it then went on the dev team task list!

To conclude on the customisation part, “Female and male customisation allow both sex players to choose whatever they want their hero to be. Also, if the players loot a female princess wig from an enemy, they can use it on their male hero!”

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The story behind Platformines(developed by Magiko Gaming and coming out on 28th March) is one full of surprises and intrigue! Thanks to this first “Dev. Diary”, players will get the chance to see how a developer comes up with new ideas.

When asked about the origin of their game and the engine behind it, Cedric and Ludovic (the co-founders) said: “Back in 2011, after several months of hard work, we had built a solid 2D platformer engine. It had allowed us to notably release “Platformance: Castle Pain” and “Platformance: Temple Death”, 2 games that were well appreciated by the gamers, especially hardcore ones. We had also developed a technology which allowed us to explore a seamless world (no in-game loading)”.

After those small and highly motivating successes, Magiko Gaming started to think about the idea of creating a platformer that takes place in a huge seamless world! When asked about the first prototype born from this idea, one of the developers said “I remember a gigantic world composed of only little linear platforms, with a target to reach. I remember my 9 years old nephew would play for hours in this minimal world!”

From September 2011, the two friends would start to meet-up more often and started to have a better idea of the first step for Platformines’ design: “Unlike a well-known game based on blocks, we thought about the fog: Rather than discovering new areas by deleting existing blocks, why not simply fill the world with fog :)? Then you only need to remove this fog when you have discovered a zone, and you obtain an environment that allows fluid movements and keeps the pleasure of exploration!”

Then Ludovic and Cedric thought that it was time to think about the second step: the randomly generated worlds! “After several attempts, a prototype showed us that we had to consider a world based on 1000×1000 blocks squares! We then started to work on several ways to build those block-based environments. Soon after those experiments, we managed to create a generic 2D algorithm to match blocks, and we also found a way to build new zones by juxtaposing predefined patterns”

According to the developers, the next step was all about magic, “Changing the parameters and realizing what kind of world we can obtain was absolutely astounding! We started to note all the most interesting parameters and patterns in order to apply them for the final game”.

So far, we are getting great support from people all around but at this point we still need more, so please if you haven’t done it yet go to our GreenLight Page and click on the YES button to tell Steam that you want Platformines on the service. That’s just one click we’re asking you that will make the game available to all 🙂

Also, if you can leave a happy comment on there as well that would be ace!

Tell your friends about it as the more people we get the faster we’ll get on.

Thanks a bunch and we’ll be happy to let you know when the game is finally out on Steam (soon if you help us!)

Just a short update to let you know that we’ve been hard at work on fixing issues and addressing feedback reported from the first beta. We’ve also added new stuff that you’ll be able to try out in the beta 2.

Here is short list of the main things we did that you will see in the beta 2:

Way less tips intrusion (now they disable by default when you close)

beginning gun is less powerful, so you’ll get better loot sooner (makes the game a bit harder at first)

some fixing to collision and falling damage

many bug fixes and tweaks

added bonus on hats

added Turrets!

added Saw gears!

added Bats!

added MutaCrabs!

added Girl characters !! (when you create your hero and in game enemies)

Also we added more very cool content in the full version, but you won’t get to experience it until the release (not gonna spoil you yet! Surprise is key.)

The character selection screen with a customisation of a female character (click for full effect)

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Here we are, 9 month later with a build that is very close to the final release. We are currently testing the game with a closed beta to make sure the game runs well on different PC configurations and to polish the overall experience.

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It seems like we’re seeing the end of the tunnel. We started working on Platformines about 7 or 8 months ago, and there is just a few weeks left for it to be finished. Current state of the game: we have all the features in and most of the contents. What’s left to do: tweaking, more content, PC keyboard/mouse inputs, and some polishing. The good thing is that the game is really fun and addicting. Often we’ll start some testing and end up playing for a few hours. That’s a really good sign!

Some more deadly traps await.... (click for fullsize)

A typical game will last around 10 hours, maybe a bit less once you played it and you get better at it. Since the world is randomly generated, each game is unique and has it own flavor.

We have taken some big design decisions regarding the teleporting: we streamlined the process to make the game more straight forward and more action based. We were glad that after testing it felt even better. We had invited a few people to test our builds and everyone all really liked the exploration side of the game. So we had to make sure you spend most of the time exploring (hence the teleport changes).

The question marks shows the point of interests. The exclamation point is your current goal. (click for fullsize)

The end game stuff is there as well. Basically you explore the world to find 9 missing parts that you need in order to rebuild the RoboDIG; a giant digger machine that you need to escape the mines. The nine parts are scattered in different places that get harder and harder to reach.

The good thing is, all the loot you get will help you buy upgrades for your energy belt, new weapons, ect, so you’ll be able to get on the tougher parts of the world with it.

Weapons, belt upgrades, bigger bags are part of the Easy Market selection. (click for fullsize)

Some fun stuff that we didn’t planned at first were added: droppable wigs and hats. Sometimes when you kill an NPC you’ll will be able to get his hat or his wig and wear it. You will also find some rare hats in chests…

So, it seems like you should soon be able to get lost and explore the mines for treasures and fame.

Hello. The good people over at Dealspwn.com have asked us about our two man team and details about Platformines. It’s a good read if you are curious about us and want to get the latest details on Platformines.

As you can see at the beginning of the video (watch in HD), there is now a ‘customize hero’ screen that lets you deck out your dude. We are still adding more possibilities but already you can make some pretty original faces.

( hit that Watch on Youtube button and then HD 720p, thx! )

Inventories: We have full working interfaces for exchanging objects, storing, buying and selling your goods. This was a pretty heavy task to design and code, so it’s really nice to see it fully functional ingame.

We have started to implement the whole progression of the game: increasing difficulty requiring you to get better energy belts and weapons to be able to go further down. Lots of work is left in order to actually fine tune it all, but it will be a fun task (hopefully!).

Finally, some content has been added, like sounds and music, traps, blocks, monsters, ect… still a lot of content to be done as well.

You're deep down the mines and there is that mean cardboard-head dude ...

First we have a home base. This is the place where you start the game, and where you’ll keep coming back to sell/buy stuff, save the game and teleport further down the mines. The teleporters are pretty cool. You can change their position from a computer mini map and teleport to wherever you have been before. So as you go down and explore you move the portal further and further, this way you are always close to your base. If you decide that you want to explore another part of the map, you simply go back to your base, and move the teleporter to where you want to go next.

Home base

The NPCs are a bit smarter now, they can ‘air-jump’ and go across different platforms.

There is plenty of new weapons to see as well. There is revolvers, shotguns and rocket-launchers made of different combinations of the metals you can find in the mines. (more on this later)

Walking in front of an object displays an info windows with commands on what you can do.

We have started to implement traps also, and so there is some pushing blocks that can squish you, and some rotating cave diggers that do damage on contact. More diverse traps will added in the game later, but right now we know it works well with just a few traps already.

HD video here:

There still a lot to be done, but we are happy with the progress. Next: inventory, shopping, actually grabbing objects, weapons with different behaviors, complex traps…

What's next ??!!

As usual, don’t hesitate to comment, as we would like to know what you like, don’t like, or would like to see in the game.

That’s right Platformance: Temple Death for Windows Phone 7 is featured on the Games Marketplace in France. That’s pretty neat. Thanks to Geoffrey Mohaer who spotted it first! If you see it on your country’s phone too let us know.

Hoping all these new Nokia Lumia phone selling like hot cakes will get their Platformance groove on 😉

Howdy. We have characters that shoot to show you this time. The following video displays NPCs from our character generator that can create 128625 (!) combinations right now. It also shows shooting (You can shoot in all 4 directions) with handguns and some temporary AI . Keep in mind that this is all very basic but it is coming along nicely and we’re starting to have a game that’s fun to play.

A bunch of randomly generated characters for Platformines (click for the big picture)

Click full screen on the video below to see some action in full HD glory!

That’s it for now, stay tuned right here or on the facebook platformines pages for more info. Now we must get back to work on getting fat loot from quests in Skyrim… oops I mean getting back to work on our indie game 😉

Time for another short development update. This time around we figured a short video would be better than anything else.

A short platformines prototype video that shows exploration and fog of war. No npc or traps yet… Hit FullScreen button !

Right now we have a huge world that you can explore by double jumping around. The hero’s light shows what’s around and a pretty animated fog of war hides where you haven’t been yet. It’s pretty handy when you want to come back on your footsteps. Also the light radius decreases as your energy drops down adding pressure. Since this is Platformance territory the much beloved Zoom feature is back (more on this later…)

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Hello, here is quick update with a little screenshot showing some progress on graphics; more lighting details and some ruins themed blocks. Lots of work has been done code wise but it’s ‘under the hood’ type of stuff so you won’t see anything yet…